The Vatican and Darwin: two steps back

Reports that Cardinal Schonborn retreated from his obscurantist view about evolution seem to have been greatly exaggerated. The full text of his sermon suggests that he is fully bought in to Intelligent Design, even down to the metaphor of the timepiece that did not come together by chance. He says some nice words about Darwin, but in the end concludes that prejudice ought to trump research (or, as the Cardinal puts it, “my common sense cannot be shut out by the scientific method”). The key point is that Creation is a continuous process, so the Divine will is needed as an explanatory factor at every moment. What room the Cardinal thinks this leaves for science isn’t clear.

Intellectually speaking, the sermon is a remarkably shabby performance; Schonbron dances past the Galileo affair disgracefully, with a nasty crack about “the black legend” and mutterings about inaccuracy, but no attempt to explain why the conventional view needs to be revised.

But the Pope has now weighed in, apparently on the obscurantist side of the debate. If someone has a link to an English translation of the full text (apparently published in L’Osservatore Romano), please let me know.

Of course, in a sane world the opinions of Cardinals and Popes about evolution would be of no more interest than the views of biologists on the Real Presence, and theologians who did feel compelled to speak on these subjects would talk to biologists first. But that’s not the world we actually live in.